Reasonable Consequentialism says that for an action of mine to be right, I must actually come to a reasonable conclusion beforehand about the consequences. This basic form of consequentialism holds an action as ethical if and only if it produces more beneficial/pleasure-causing outcomes than negative/pain-causing ones. The utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham is a well known example of consequentialism. A volume of his Constitutional Code, which he did not live to complete, was published in 1830. But common sense may rebel against that idea as being unfair or unjust. Bentham's version involves . How could we have speeding laws, for example, if it would sometimes be ethical to break the speed limit? Goodness and Utilitarianism., Williams, Bernard. The defender of Reasonable or Dual Consequentialism might argue that the objection has misunderstood what it is to have a reasonable estimate of an actions consequences. Eventually you decide to toss the coin, you win, and I bake the cake. If you happen to be in charge of setting speed limits, you might be thinking that a bad result is a death: the fewer deaths, the better. His friends, too, practically rewrote several of his books from the mass of rough though orderly memoranda that Bentham himself prepared. Utilitarianism and the Virtues., Harsanyi, John. Unfortunately, he was not aware of his limitations. . This controversial line of thought is not only an objection to the above argument for consequentialism, it is also an argument against consequentialism. See Bales (1971), Railton (1994). According to this theory, it would be unethical for you to speed on an empty street at two oclock in the morning. That insight is that morally appropriate behavior will not harm others, but instead increase happiness or 'utility.' He said, she said: Investigating the Christian Porter Case. What is good is happinessand whatever promotes that. Consequentialism is controversial. (From 2), What objectively ought to happen is whatever would promote the greatest possible balance of satisfaction of the desires of all people. Further, if you have a big secret that would repel nice honest people, any nice honest person who learns your secret will not want to be your friend. Another worry is that it is obscure whether there is anything sensible that might be meant by a greater or lesser amount of satisfaction of desire. Are all desires to count or only those that exist at the time of the action or the decision (even if they disappear before most of the consequences arrive)? Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more. If we take the above view that the good is happiness, and plug it into Plain Consequentialism, we get the view that the right action is the one that causes the most happinessmore than would have been caused by any of the available alternative actions. Her expectation that it will produce or promote that good outcome is her reason for performing the action. Is it okay to do bad things for a good cause? The most famous form of consequentialist ethics is utilitarianism which was first proposed by Jeremy Bentham and then furthered by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century. If you want to do good for me, doing the sorts of things that are normally thought of as violating my personal rights is probably a bad bet. Of course, once one introduces such a complex standard of goodness for consequences, questions arise about how to rate the relative importance of the parts of the standard and about how such a view can be given theoretical elegance. Hence consequentialism is opposed to common sense and so is probably wrong. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeremy-Bentham, University of Minnesota Duluth - College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences - Biography of Jeremy Bentham, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Jeremy Bentham, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Biography of Jeremy Bentham, The Library of Economics and Liberty - Biography of Jeremy Bentham, Journal of Liberal History - Biography of Jeremy Bentham, Crime Museum - Biography of Jeremy Bentham, Jeremy Bentham - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up), An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. (For predecessors, see Schneewind 1997, 2002.) (i) The objectively right action is the action with the best consequences, and (ii) the morally right action is any action with the best reasonably expected consequences. One worry about these arguments is that if it happens that the most efficient way for you to help people is to send as much money as possible to help desperately poor people you do not know, then your following consequentialism may involve thinking of the people you know mainly as potential sources of money. Author of. William Paley Key proponents Jeremy Bentham John Stuart Mill Henry Sidgwick R. M. Hare Peter Singer Types of utilitarianism Negative Rule Act Two-level Total Average Preference Classical Key concepts Pain Suffering Pleasure Utility Happiness Eudaimonia Consequentialism Equal consideration Felicific calculus Utilitarian social choice rule Problems Second, more concretely, to be moral is to care about people. Bentham accepts a kind of utilitarianism known as hedonistic utilitarianism, which says pleasure is the only thing that is good and pain is the only thing that is bad. One problem with the theory is that it can be hard to measure different benefits to decide which one is morally preferable. For one thing, 1 and 2 do not tell us that the ideal spectator would have no concerns other than those she derives from sympathy, but 3 does make that assumption. Although there are references to this idea in the works of ancient philosopherEpicurus, its closely associated with English philosopherJeremy Bentham. It says that among all the very many things we could do at any given time, only one or a very few of them are right. So far as you can tell, heads and tails are equally likely, even if objectively there is a 100% chance of heads. You cannot know all that before you act (or after). On the one hand, one might think it is an objection, since we are responsible for doing what is morally right and so we must be able to know what is morally right. I do not donate. Your intentional action was to toss the coin, not to toss the coin in the precise manner and position in which you ended up tossing it. Jeremy Benthams panopticon is a design for a prison that allows for the constant surveillance of prisoners. Or suppose the recommendation that comes from you friend, your mother, your heart, or your prior resolution, reflects insight into the implications of your action that would not be reflected in the conscious estimates of consequences you might be able to work up on the spur of the moment. It is unclear, then, whether the standard to which we should hold theories of morality is that they must explain why morality is easy to know about or why morality is terribly hard to know about! Many forms of consequentialism have been proposed that attempt to deal with the issue of comparing moral value. Hence to be moral is to care about people equally or impartially, so far as one can, which means trying to benefit people as much as one can. The codification of law was one of Benthams chief preoccupations, and it was his ambition to be allowed to prepare a code of laws for his own or some foreign country. Jeremy Bentham is considered as the father of Utilitarianism. (From 2), X is desirable means If X occurs, X will help satisfy desire. (Premise), What is ultimately desirable for each person is her own happinessand whatever promotes that. He tried to define what he thought were the basic concepts of ethics, but the majority of his definitions are oversimple or ambiguous or both, and his felicific calculus, a method for calculating amounts of happiness, as even his warmest admirers have admitted, cannot be used. Act-Utilitarianism: Account of Right-Making Characteristics or Decision-Making Procedures?, Bennett, Jonathan. Counselling and bespoke consulting programs to help you make better decisions and navigate complexity. Bentham found the grand and fundamental fault of the Commentaries to be Blackstones antipathy to reform. Benthams book, written in a clear and concise style different from that of his later works, may be said to mark the beginning of philosophical radicalism. As a critic of institutions Bentham was admirable. Consequentialism | Definition . Rule Consequentialism in one or another form has received a great deal of discussion. Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality,, Scheffler, Samuel. But if the spectator replaces her conflicting desires, then according to 2 she no longer has the sympathy that makes her a reliable judge. As I proceed to feed my cat, I almost never think about the consequences of doing so versus not doing so, but surely it would be wrong to say that I have no view or that my view is not reasonable. A sane person will decide on a project and then simply follow through, unless some new situation arises. C. Morality and the Theory of Rational Behavior., Hart, H. L. A. See Brandt (1979); Hooker et al (2000). Similarly, if a certain action would be good for me but bad for you, there is a reason for it and a reason against it. Of course, we cannot know the overall consequences of our actions. Hence another kind of theory has been suggested, which might or might not be regarded as a version of consequentialism. Please select which sections you would like to print: Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, University of Oxford, 196775; Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Then you will have had twice as much happiness as I had. For example, suppose that many years ago, before anyone knew that gold is made of atoms or that it is the element with atomic number 79, Jack and Jill were hiking in unclaimed land and came upon some heavy shiny lumps. This Double Consequentialism differs from the Dual Consequentialism of 1.e above only in point (ii), on the morally right action. There is disagreement about how consequentialism can best be formulated as a precise theory, and so there are various versions of consequentialism. What is morality? Consequentialism is, as we have seen, one of many different proposed answers to that question. The skeleton was then reconstructed, supplied with a wax head to replace the original (which had been mummified), dressed in Benthams own clothes and set upright in a glass-fronted case. (There can also be a scalar version of this view and of the others introduced below.). It says nothing about right and wrong. In this book he defined the principle of utility as that property in any object whereby it tends to produce pleasure, good or happiness, or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered. Mankind, he said, was governed by two sovereign motives, pain and pleasure; and the principle of utility recognized this state of affairs. The object of all legislation must be the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He deduced from the principle of utility that, since all punishment involves pain and is therefore evil, it ought only to be used so far as it promises to exclude some greater evil.. One argument for consequentialism begins from the premise that whatever a person does, she does in order to produce some sort of good result. Thus, without reasonably thinking about my choice, I have done what it would have been reasonable to estimate would have the best results. For you could have tossed the coin in many slightly different ways, and in many slightly different positions. v. t. e. Jeremy Bentham ( / bnm /; 4 February 1747/8 O.S. See Sen (1982). For example, an extra dollar does more good for a poor person than for a rich person. You might want to say that I fortunately did the right thing, but that my action was morally wrong. Presumably the stronger desires are to count for more. But consequentialism is still controversial. And if you are a skilled surgeon, anything that hampers your operations will hurt people. In other words, one must ask whether the action promotes benefit overall. [2] [3] [4] - 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Hooker, Brad; Mason, Elinor; and Miller, Dale E. Jackson, Frank. What then, do these two kinds of consequence have in common, that makes them both consequences? 1 This is the principle at the foundation of utilitarian ethics, as it states that any action is right insofar as it increases happiness, and wrong insofar as it increases pain. Unhappiness can be thought of as negative happiness, so that the total happiness we two have in this third case is zero. The fame of his writings spread widely and rapidly. Now, different kinds of benefits yield different kinds of reasons. She cares only about whether it actually succeededeven though, as explained above, the success, when it happens, is arguably not a consequence of your intentional action at all. Consequentialism is the ethical theory that states that an action is morally right if and only if it maximizes the good. Therefore, your intentional action of tossing did not make you win. Utilitarianism is one of the most important and influential moral theories of modern times. In this way he defined what "good" really is. ---, 2003, "Review of Mulgan's Demands of Consequentialism", Philosophy, 78: 289-96 . It is true that the particular scheme that he worked out was bizarre and spoiled by the elaborate detail that he loved. See Sen (1982), Nagel (1986), Scheffler (1994), Bennett (1989), Scheffler (1989), Brink (1986), and Skorupski (1995). 3 says that she has another desirethe desire that all her other desires be fulfilled as much as possible.
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